


Pas De Deux

by blanchards



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Universe, Chronic Pain, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Suki/Ty Lee (Avatar), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sokka (Avatar) Needs a Hug, Sokka (Avatar)-centric, no beta you've been warned, where to fucking start with this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:33:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27411241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blanchards/pseuds/blanchards
Summary: Through silent, suffocating evenings, kept awake by his thoughts and the dull aching in his leg, Sokka has gotten to know the current weight behind his eyelids like an old friend. It surprises only Zuko when he cries.It turns out that coronation firework celebrations are the perfect time for facing your traumas, the very ones you share with the boy you once swore to hate. Who knew.
Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 39
Kudos: 319





	Pas De Deux

**Author's Note:**

> I'm guessing we could all use a little distraction right now, so I'm coming to you with some good old fashioned hurt/comfort featuring Sokka unpacking uncomfortable feelings and Zuko being a good listener (and also a cuddler). Minor Suki/Ty Lee because I literally cannot help myself. T for swearing and heavy themes.

The whole day had been a blur. Hours pass like seconds, faces merge and congeal until undecipherable from one another. Sokka is standing in a large group of people before the Fire Nation palace doors, craning up at the night sky, and he just wants to be _alone_. Zuko’s coronation had lasted about six years, from meetings to crownings to speeches and banquets. Every person Sokka passes wants to hear all about what he did, how he helped the Avatar save the world and, worst of all, they each give the same sympathetic look to his leg, and it makes him feel pathetic. He was tired of people pitying him and waking up in cold sweats every night, pain searing through his calf. Pain still flickered when he applied too much weight and the crutches did little to alleviate it. Katara had done her best in the aftermath of the fall to ease the injury and help it heal - but it was never enough. 

He dips his line of sight temporarily to once again scan the crowd for Zuko who’s presence had managed to elude him for going on four hours. Sokka was alone at 9 pm surrounded by strangers, which really only meant one of two things: either the inevitable assassination attempts had already begun or he was off sulking on a balcony somewhere. He guesses the latter, mainly because it was more amusing and extremely predictable for Zuko to miss his own fucking coronation just to brood - he wouldn’t admit that even considering the alternative felt like plunging rapidly into ice water, the kind that chokes your breath from your lungs. With little difficulty and knowing charm he excuses himself politely from the group of citizens and noblemen half-heartedly attempting to include him in their conversations, Sokka figures he likely won’t be missed much. By the way that, as he glances back, the space he left has already been filled, he marks this assumption correct.

Zuko is, indeed, brooding on a balcony when Sokka finds him ten minutes later. He’s had to climb two flights of stairs and walk what feels like the length and breadth of the palace - the relief he feels in his leg when he finally leans against the railing to take the weight off is immeasurable. Zuko is scowling at the sky, unmoved by his presence.

“You know they’re all here for you right?” he gestures towards the crowd below with the hand he isn't using to brace himself. Zuko says nothing, he doesn’t need to - the grimace on his face already tells a monologue. 

“Why don’t they hate me?” he asks, as if to himself or no one in particular, at last. Sokka quirks an eyebrow, forcing his exhausted expression to form a grin. 

“It’s only been 24 hours. Give it time.”

Zuko only frowns. Sokka nudges him with his free arm a little too enthusiastically, his whole body wincing as a sharp pain shoots out from the sudden movement. He rests back onto his crutches cursing under his breath, when he looks up again, Zuko’s intense stare has shifted to him. Sokka tries not to wilt under his gaze. Instead, he forces his own eyes to meet the pair seemingly dismantling him layer by layer. He’s not sure if he’s comforted or disturbed by the fact Zuko wears the same tired expression as he does - at least it means he’s not alone.

Nobody speaks, until a high pitched whine whistling through the air disturbs them, crashing into the night sky timed along with the realisation that neither of them knows quite what to say. They both involuntarily steel themselves at the sound of the explosion, and Sokka despises his fight or flight reflexes for assuming he’s in danger so easily. His anger is quickly shifted though, because who’s idea was it, really, to propose fireworks celebrating the return of a group of kids out fighting a literal war? He grits his teeth as another one goes off. 

The first days after the war ended were some of the worst in Sokka’s life. There was no comfort to be found amongst the hard mattresses and scratchy blankets of the fire nation hospital he wound up in. And in the hours he did manage to sleep, the night terrors were so much worse. Screaming, shouting, Toph slipping from his grasp, Suki going down with the airship only to never return. _Katara._ Awful, awful images of Katara slain at the tip of Azula’s blue forked lightning, Sokka unable to protect her - unable to protect anyone. Helpless. It was around his third consecutive night of personal hell that he became aware of his not being alone in the room, when upon waking with a start and hyperventilating, he felt fingers weave into his own, a tall figure sitting on his bed. Sokka didn’t put together that the figure was Zuko until the following morning, the curtain beside his bed now pulled back for once, revealing a peaceful sleeping figure, dark hair tousled around his face. When he awoke later that day, the two had shared a momentary look - one of recognition, but the event was never spoken about.

After that, Zuko had kept the partition open, only closing it to change or dress his wounds. And whenever one of them was roused suddenly in the night to the other thrashing around in fear, grips would be intertwined and they would lie beside one another, completely still, in silent solidarity until the sunlight returned. People had visited, gradually, over their week-long stints lying in those beds, but more often than not Sokka only found it a burden. He didn’t want to talk, he wanted to sit in silence with his thoughts, he wanted to bury his head in drawing and writing, he wanted to _sleep_. Only Zuko seemed to understand. 

It was undeniable that, because of this, Sokka had left the hospital far more attached to the fire bender than when he’d gone in. It’s not as if there was any animosity before this, there hadn’t been for a while, but it still served to stir up something that sat uncomfortably in his chest. Now, his nightmares were intermingled with dreams of Zuko and Boiling Rock and the prelude to the war. All the moments his mind could conjure up of just the two of them, old noted memories now coloured in a new light. A comprehensive visual list of every way in which their minds joined and moved in tandem. Zuko managed something that had always seemed impossibly out of reach - he understood him. Thoroughly, down to his bones. Sokka wondered, perhaps, if this was why when he saw the way Ty Lee boasted her joining of the Kyoshi warriors with uncontained glee or twirled her hair and stared up through big doe eyes, or the way Suki laughed at things that weren’t even funny and her hand lingered the girls waist for a little too long - it didn’t bother him. Not as much as it should have. Not even close. 

Another explosion streaking across the sky brings Sokka back to his senses with an unwelcome intensity. Zuko is no longer looking at him. If it weren’t for the heavy, steadying breaths, he’d almost seem calm - a practise he’d been perfecting since childhood, the art of a reclusive, stoic expression, keeping all his cards firmly to his chest. Sokka knows better though. He sees just as much agony lie within Zuko as he feels coursing through his own veins, there’s a shadow that hangs over both their heads, echoes of “what ifs” loud enough to drown out an army. You can’t see it at first, or perhaps at all, as they smile and take whatever scrap of normalcy they can obtain - but they see it in one another, a close-but-not-quite-there-yet looming dark cloud, a never-ending flicker at the very back of their minds. A promise of bad things to come, but never revealing what they might be. 

Desperate for any distraction from his own anxiety, he decides to break his silence and revisit Zuko’s previous question of _why his own subjects didn't hate him_ unprompted. 

“Just thinking,” he starts, tentatively, letting out the words hang in the air until he knows it’s wise to proceed, “you’re- I mean excuse me but you’re the fucking Fire Lord, Zuko. Are they even _allowed_ to hate you?”

“Of course they’re allowed to hate me.” He snaps back before Sokka even has the last syllable out. He watches as he stares down in frustration at the balcony railing, then transferring his eye-line back to the sky. They stand in silence again. Zuko continues to take laboured breaths, Sokka continues to feel the bright lights and noise begin to smother him once more, he tightens his grip on the railing to ground himself. 

“I’m lucky they aren’t calling to dismantle the whole fucking system.” Zuko offers, after a while. He’s now slumped over, resting his elbows on the railing as he looks vaguely towards the direction of the display. He pinches the bridge of his nose, his face a very familiar mix of regret and disgust, “All my family has ever done is wreak havoc on these nations.”

Sokka wants to reassure him, but he can’t, because it’s true. He doesn’t know much of the lineage beyond Sozin, but he’s not sure that it matters - Zuko’s family name has been, and likely would forever be, associated with the three men who lorded it over the world. Callous and cruel, sending waves of torment with every next step onto their stolen land. When Sokka had met Zuko, he was sure that path was doomed to continue, he’d had no reason to see him as anything other than another megalomaniac. And no one would have blamed him for that perception - especially Zuko, whom, for the longest time, did a pretty good job of living up to it. It was pointedly hard, now, to take the idea he once had of _Prince_ Zuko and then the knowledge he now had of _Zuko_ and marry them together. Sokka wished he didn’t have to. He wished things were simpler and black and white and they didn’t live in a world where the boy who should be his enemy could be one of his closest companions. It made his head hurt. He suddenly, deeply, missed his home. 

“You’re not your father.” He says, instead. A pause, and then, “We were too young to be fighting his war.” 

Sokka almost tells it to himself; a lost, sad, far away look in his eyes. Long are the nights where he lies awake, even now, lamenting his responsibilities and counting down the minutes till the sun rises. On their travels, he’d had little time to reflect, often overwhelmed by sheer exhaustion. But now, now things were too quiet, and Zuko’s palace was too big and the rooms too empty. In the aftermath things were _supposed_ to fall into place - align. Instead, it made less sense than ever. He missed his tribe, his family, his mother. Missed the days before all he knew was destruction and loss. And he cares for Zuko, he does, likely more than he’ll ever admit - but a deep, foggy, fatigue can’t help but set in where the energy is expended to comfort him. 

So he doesn’t say more than that. He lets himself prioritise his own needs, for the first time since he was 10, and they stand in silence watching the sky light up. 

“I’m sorry.” Breaks the air like a pinprick, bursting the tension around them. 

It hangs in the atmosphere for five minutes, ten minutes, Sokka isn’t sure how long it’s been since Zuko spoke but every time he tries to respond, the sentence dies in his throat. He wants to say “I know” but he can’t find the words. There’s a pressure behind his eyes that wasn’t there before. He dares to meet the gaze he feels set upon him, and finds close to nothing in return: Zuko’s expression is measured and nearly unreadable. Nearly. There’s a clear pain behind his eyes, but he’s doing what he can to mask it, waiting to gauge Sokka’s reaction first - he knows this isn’t about him. 

Through silent, suffocating evenings, kept awake by his thoughts and the dull aching in his leg, Sokka has gotten to know the current weight behind his eyelids like an old friend. It surprises only Zuko when he cries. 

People say they love you in different ways: Katara asks too many questions and offers to aid with tasks, his father will bring him food and pelts and shake his shoulder fondly, his mother would gently lull him to sleep with fingers threaded through his hair. Zuko, Sokka thinks, shows affection through defence, through loyalty. His care is displayed in full colour on a battlefield or a showdown, in acts of physical selflessness and bravery. Plain as anything, Zuko shows love through protection. As an arm gently, hesitantly, wraps around his back, anchoring his shoulder and pulling him inwards, Sokka fleetingly wonders if he might have gotten that wrong. 

Or maybe he got it very right. For what is this display: arms now firmly locked around his heaving torso - if not an act of protection? Just the two of them, against a fiery backdrop of cartwheeling colours, the fizzling in the air too loud to speak over. The war may be finished, ashes singed and cooled, but there is another raging in Sokka’s mind, and this one takes and takes and takes. And his conclusions are strange to think, but also make perfect sense. In a violent, despairing sea of anger and confusion as Sokka stands unsteady and frozen and hopelessly lost, Zuko’s arms tether to his own, calloused fingers lacing through each other - and Zuko is _protecting_ him. 

He smells like lemongrass and soap, and something vaguely spicy that Sokka can’t quite place. His clothes are velvet-soft and the hair that hangs gently and tickles his face is as well. The tears, this time, are not as torrential as they’ve been before. They feel emptier, as time goes on, the emotional charge behind them fading into a throbbing pain within Sokka’s temples. It gets to a point where they seem to flow simply because they must, because they’ve been building behind his irises for too long, and then as quickly as they appeared, they start to stop. His face is still hot and his breaths are almost alarmingly shallow but Sokka is breathing again, standing upright albeit a little crumpled into Zuko’s arms. He is _alive,_ and the world around them slowly comes back into focus. He isn’t embarrassed only because he can’t be, only because what little fight was left in him has dissipated, taking with it all his forced smiles and sad eyes and the urge to say he’s fine. He takes in a gulp of the warm mid-evening air, and it feels lighter. Oxygen flows into his lungs smoothly, tinted by the scent of Zuko’s shampoo. 

Neither says anything for a good duration of minutes. Sokka’s thoughts continue to go unspoken and he wonders if Zuko can hear them anyway. _Don’t let me go._ Zuko just holds on tighter, his steady heartbeat providing Sokka with momentary respite from the crashing in his head, as he tries to force his own to mirror the rhythm. Zuko lifts one hand cautiously and Sokka assumes it’s to pull away, he ignores the swell of disappointment in his stomach - he has too much to think about already without adding it to the list. But the hand just resumes position on his back, this time higher up, rubbing slow, languid circles between his shoulder blades. In complete spite of himself, it only compels Sokka to burrow his head further into the robes he’s pressed against, letting out a sigh. He exhales as if the action alone could free his body of the rigid tension coursing through it, bolts of adrenaline ready to give way for exhaustion. Sokka is so, so tired. He has been for months. All he wants is to let the moment envelop him entirely. 

Finding his voice, at last somewhere beneath the layers of anguish that buried him, memories that tied like a knot in his throat, it’s Sokka that finally speaks. “Thank you.” is all he can muster at first, “Don’t go.” 

Perhaps he’d once have felt pathetic, or shy, in the days before the battle: lying on warm sand and scolding his eyes for whenever they’d wander to the boy beside him, taking in every mark and freckle. He’d have been trying not to fixate on the way Zuko rubs his thumb into his palm when he’s nervous or the way his laughs and smiles were finally starting to meet his eyes. And he’d be taking it all in regardless, harbouring it away, turning it over in his mind at night like a puzzle he was desperate to solve. If he’d heard those words leaving his lips then, he’d have been incredulous. But that was before. Before their walls came crashing down beside them, before the scorching heat in his leg. Before he had to watch the desperate grip of his own hand become a lifeline for a friend. Back on that warm sand, their last chance to play pretend at normalcy. To not be child soldiers. Then, he would have been embarrassed, but now he clung to Zuko like a raft - suddenly aware that he was terrified of drowning. The hand has moved from his upper back to his hair - deft fingers releasing the tension held in Sokka’s wolf tail and gently running through it. The action is familiar, the closest he’s felt to safety in months, and the irony isn’t lost on him that it came from someone who once threatened that very thing. 

Gentle shushes and noises designed to soothe brake into Sokka’s echo chamber before conflicting, dizzying ideas have time to seize his focus again. He pushes himself further into Zuko, praying the thoughts can’t follow him there. “Please, don’t go.” He repeats, quieter this time, almost a whisper into the silk. 

Sokka doesn’t need to look up to see the pained expression on the face that watches him. He’s studied that face like religion. He knows from the sudden stiffness in the shoulders to the clench of the jaw _exactly_ what look is being cast his way. One of sorrow, regret, but also one that carried it’s own traumas, its own night terrors. Silent tears choked back and hands that silenced mouths. The fingers rooted amongst his hair clutch at him, and the arm around his lower back does as well, Zuko is holding on to Sokka every bit as much as he was to him. Every atom, equally afraid of the tide that could sweep them away. 

“I won’t.” 

The voice is solid, but it catches at the end. A face dips and buries itself into the crown of Sokka’s head, and what he swears feels like a tear falls with it. And with a bittersweet moment, swathed in each other's grip, syncopating heartbeats and tears wiped away with scarred but gentle hands, Sokka has his first realisation, since before the war, that brings him peace.

They can’t stop the ground from falling through beneath them, stop the painful waves that crash through their slumber or stop adults from waging the wars that hang heavy off their shoulders. 

But they hold each other, they understand each other, tonight. And, _even if they’re the only ones who do_ , Sokka thinks, that could be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Leave a comment if you like and as per you can find me on tumblr @[tysukis](https://tysukis.tumblr.com/)  
> Godspeed, America.


End file.
